in two other positions along the mountainside. I knewthe village would be absolutely stunning under thelight of a faux full moon.’The Japanese see the moon ‘as this incredibly sublimeand sacred thing’, continues Ishii. ‘I believe that Japan’stradition and culture of lighting is quite extraordinary.And it took me a while to realise it, but in retrospectmy designs are all founded in that soft, tranquilJapanese lighting aesthetic.’Nature is a strong influence, not least in her subtleevocations of the qualities of natural light. In herscheme for Tokyo’s venerable Kabuki Theatre in2013, the colour temperature of the exterior lightingchanges imperceptibly every day, with the effectthat in midwinter it’s a relatively warm 3000K, whilein the midsummer it’s a cool 5000K as a foil to theJapanese capital’s heat and humidity. In her schemefor Ohtsu City, capital of Shiga Prefecture in centralJapan, she highlighted different locations accordingto the season. The area around the Miidera Temple,famous for its cherry blossom, was picked out inspring, while the luxuriant foliage surrounding theSaikyoji Temple came to the fore in summer, followedby the autumn colours of the landscape around theShinto shrine of Hiyoshi Jinja.

Although she will be 80 in October this year, public
speaker, educator, author and government committee
member Ishii is patently not the retiring type. Among
numerous projects currently going through her studio
is work for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 (incidentally,
her father Teizo Takeuchi was a member of Japan’s
football team for the 1936 Berlin Olympics) and she’s
designing the relighting of no fewer than 10 bridges
across the Sumida River in Tokyo.

‘All the bridges will have very different light treatments,’
says Ishii. ‘We have to respect the history, religion and
traditional Japanese culture’. She points out that the city’s
roots can be traced back to the banks of the Sumida.
‘Our people respect nature and the four seasons, so
we’ll create lots of programmes for each bridge so we
can control them seasonally as well as for festivals. The
lighting colour will respect the natural colour of each
bridge; we’re not going to change into green and red,
say. Only the handrail will change colour’.

Opposite: the moonlit mise-en-scene created for the traditional
thatched village of Shirakawa,
a Unesco World Heritage Site
Above (and overleaf): Ishii’s
lighting scheme for the Sensoji
Temple in Asakusa, Tokyo’s
oldest temple, won her one
of many IESNA awards in 2005